Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

I apologize, Enthusiasts, for my fecal obsession over the past few days, but I’ve become a Freudian; next I will begin putting you in my mouth. This apology does not negate the fact that I will now talk about doody again:

If you asked me, “TotD, would you like to see a hippo poop?” then I would say “Live or video?” but the answer is yes to both options. Whereas if you asked me, “TotD, would you like to watch a person poop?” then I would ask no follow-up questions; it would be an immediate hard pass. “What if that person was very attractive?” you would continue. And I would say “That somehow makes it worse,” and walk away from you, because you are into things I am not into.

Hippos are fascinating poopers: they whirl their little tails and splatter an area the size of a kindergarten classroom behind them. And, of course, they do this while standing and/or floating in rivers so they’re just soaking in their own ass-gravy all day. Animals are disgusting.

Sloths are much more discreet, but way less often: every week or so, they’ll go to ground (the only time they do) and make a boom-boom that could equal 20% of their entire body weight. This makes me respect sloths: if I had to take a thirty-pound shit three times a month, I would just kill myself. That’s not a life worth leading.

Birds have a more primitive system for getting rid of waste, because they are secretly prehistoric monsters. They combine their liquid and solid into one white effluent which is expelled onto your car. (Except for the bald eagle, which combines liberty and freedom into a red, white, and blue effluent that is expelled onto your pickup truck.)

Even further down the evolutionary ladder, there are animals that only have one hole, and it is multi-purpose; they eat and poop with it. I am once again glad for the human version of anatomy: if nothing else, that arrangement would make kissing more complicated. You would want to find out what your partner had been using their hole for. Is it a mouth or an anus? Wait: you’d be kissing them with your mouth-anus, so why would you care?

The Indian horntailed gecko lays its feces in long, delicate strings along the underside of ferns. Properly mixed with other local herbs, it can cure phlebitis, but only for guys named Ray.

In 1878, it was discovered that there is a little known species called the winterbok in Namibia. It leaves droppings shaped like pyramids; the British Museum puzzled over it for years, and mathematicians got involved, postulating that the winterbok must have an octohedral butthole. In 2002, it was discovered that both the species and its droppings were made up by a bored field researcher; the photos of the animal were just a gazelle with extra antlers glued to its head, and the poop had been molded into pyramids by the aforementioned bored field researcher.

Bears shit in the woods.

(It should be noted that bears are in the amble camp. Animals poop in two different ways: they can stop what they’re doing and concentrate on what’s happening with their backsides, or they can let the poo kinda just fall out as they’re ambling along. Horses stop; cows amble. Elephants are great at the amble-and-poop: their asses are so far away from their heads that it’s like two different worlds.)

Bat feces is so special that it gets its own name: guano. Sometimes on the nature documentaries I love so much, they will go to a cave full of bats where the floor is a mountain of guano. We will always be informed that the guano is very toxic to humans, and I always get confused: is there a cave full of shit that is beneficial to humans? If the cave was full of walrus shit and I spent two or three days camping in there, would it be cool? Or is it just the bat shit that’s bad for us? (I should stop arguing with nature documentaries.)